Fireflies, Honey, and Silk

Gilbert Waldbauer

Fireflies, Honey, and Silk is a potted survey of the ways in which
humans use insects. Its ten thematic chapters span a huge range, but
they emphasize a few key examples rather than trying to be comprehensive.

When it comes to aesthetic appreciation of insects, butterflies
rank highly for Europeans but the Japanese have traditionally prized
dragonflies and fireflies. Other topics touched on here include the
amorous associations of fleas, diligent ants, weather forecasting,
and fly fishing.

Silk gets a chapter to itself, though that also covers Pasteur's
applications of germ theory to silkworm diseases and the use of insect
pheromones in monitoring and controlling agricultural pests. A chapter
on dyes touches on Polish cochineal, lac dye and Aleppo gall, but is
mostly devoted to the cochineal scale insect of Mexico.

"Only impregnated females were used to make the dye. Before they
could lay their eggs, they were carefully removed from the plant,
one by one ... however enough females to produce sufficient
offspring for the next harvest were left ... The harvested
cochineal insects were then killed and dried by exposing them
to the sun, which produced the finest dye, or by putting them
in a heated room or an oven"

An ethnographic survey gives a feel for the diverse ways in which insects
or insect parts have been used for jewelry, ornament and decoration.
And the ways in which humans consume insects are just as varied, with
the Western prejudice against eating insects a distinct anomaly.

A miscellaneous chapter covers the use of beeswax for candles, shellac for
phonograph records (before vinyl), and sealing wax; there are digressions
on honeyguides (birds which lead mammals to hives) and other animals
that eat wax, and on dung beetles and scarabs. This leads to a chapter
on paper and ink.

"The anomalous, tumorlike plant growths known as galls may be
caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, certain worms, or mites.
But most are caused by insects ...

Boiling the Aleppo gall — or any oak gall — in water extracts
tannin, the concentration of which is unusually high in this gall.
Dissolving iron in acid produces salts of iron, such as the
iron sulfate that is commonly mixed with a tannin solution to
produce ink."

Honey from honey bees is one of the best-known and most important insect
products, but Waldbauer also looks at lesser-known bees and wasps and at
"honeypot" ants. A chapter on "cures and nostrums" covers the use of
ant or other insect jaws to suture wounds, the use of maggots for wound
debridement, and the medicinal use of honey, as well as some of the more
bizarre insect remedies tried over the centuries.

"It was also believed that deafness could be cured by putting
into the ear a pulverized earwig mixed with the urine of a hare."

In China and Japan there is a long tradition of using crickets as
entertainers, for their singing; ants, silkworms and giant cockroaches
have found a niche as pets in the West. Insects are also used in museums
to strip specimens to skeletons (Waldbauer touches here on forensic
entomology, which otherwise gets little coverage).

"In China, but not in Japan, cricket fights have been a widely
popular entertainment since the Sung dynasty (960-1278 C.E.)."

Waldbauer is an emeritus professor of entomology, but there is not
much in Fireflies, Honey and Silk about insects for their own sake:
it is very much human-centred. An epilogue, however, touches on the
broader role of insects, on their ecological significance as herbivores,
carnivores, and prey.

Its attraction is primarily historical and anthropological rather than
entomological, but Fireflies, Honey, and Silk is both entertaining
and informative.